Andie, are you sure that we aren’t related because your Mum sounds a lot like my Mama? My sweet Danish mother loves butter (practically it’s own food group in her mind) potatoes, double doses of icing on her cupcakes, more salt than the Dead sea could provide, potatoes with salt and butter, and talking. Oh, and me too!

Although I always felt loved, my mother did not give me butter on anything. I guess we were too poor for the real thing and only got margarine. But now that I’m grown (and then some), I buy butter at Costco and enjoy every tasty bit of it.

Frankly, my mom wasn’t much of a cook….and cooking for all us kids made her just do what needed to be done to get by. In the most poor of days, we were lucky if she could afford weenies for our macaroni and cheese.

Later, things got better and we had meals that always included a pathetic little iceberg lettuce “salad” (sometimes lettuce only, but on good days we got a couple of little tomato chunks). Dinners were okay, but nothing special….stroganoff (made with ground beef and cream of mushroom soup), tuna noodle casserole (made with cream of celery and cream of mushroom soup and canned tuna), and frozen Salisbury steak or sliced turkey entrees from Banquet. And canned vegetables.

Oh, and then there were the days when she got tired of cooking every night so she would make stuff ahead of time and then freeze it on a plate. Let me just say that tuna noodle casserole does NOT freeze and reheat well. The watery mess that it makes on your plate makes you not want to eat your dinner at all.

I pretty much don’t eat anything from my childhood….save for a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese when I’m feeling blue.

I just don’t understand how potatoes can be so simple and so wonderful! My friend likes to cube potatoes, and cook them with some olive oil and onion soup mix. (I think she cooks them in the microwave with a little water, because we don’t like to wait.) Scrumptious.

Every time you post a potato recipe, I star it and remind myself to thank you 1000 times over. Potatoes make the world go ’round, and I don’t care how many people laugh when I tell them spuds are my favorite food!